Black holes increasingly seen as a key to life, ‘burps’ and all

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If you love black holes, this week’s annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society didn’t disappoint. Among the hot topics of discussion–a “burping” black hole in a nearby galaxy and the role these mysterious, massive gravity wells play in clearing the field for life in galaxies like our own.

While the idea of a region of spacetime so staggeringly dense that light itself can’t escape its gravitational pull remains nightmarish to most of us, scientists have in recent years been positing that black holes are givers as much as they are takers.

Black holes were first conceived of by John Mitchell some 230 years ago as possibilities existing within the confines of Newtonian physics. A century ago, Einstein’s theories allowed Karl Schwarzschild and Johannes Droste to begin marrying the mathematics of singularities with the theoretical behavior of supermassive objects, while some decades later Robert Oppenheimer et. al. predicted that we would find actual black holes in space if we looked.

In the decades since, astronomers and physicists have refined our understanding of black holes and their event horizons, even as we still can only speculate as to what happens past the point of no return where no light travels back towards an observer. Scientists now believe supermassive black holes lie at the heart of nearly every galaxy in the universe, serving as essential fulcrums upon which the cohesiveness and stability of galaxies rest—allowing for solar systems like our own with planets that can support life.

So while it would be a very bad day if you were to fall into a black hole, you’d only be alive to do so because it existed in the first place.

Astrophysicist Paul Mason of New Mexico State University thinks black holes and supernovae may have actually “set the clock” for the beginning of life, according to Discovery News. Presenting at Tuesday’s American Astronomical Society gathering, Mason theorizes that in the early, denser universe, cosmic rays produced by black holes and exploding stars bathed galaxies with deadly radiation that made organic life impossible. But materials expelled by dying stars also became available to aggregate and coalesce into protective shields like the atmosphere and magnetosphere surrounding Earth, while supermassive black holes began anchoring galaxies themselves. The expansion of the universe also diffused the constant hammering of matter by cosmic radiation, helping create the conditions for life to begin and flourish.

Meanwhile, black holes continue to have “a big effect on the galactic landscape” in their galaxies throughout their lifespans, according to researchers led by Eric Schlegel of the University of Texas-San Antonio. Schlegel and his team have been observing the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy some 26 million light years from us that is merging with the large spiral galaxy NGC 5194.

NGC 5195’s black hole emitted “two arcs of X-ray emission” in the distant past, according to the researchers, whose study was summarized by NASA.

“We think these arcs represent fossils from two enormous blasts when the black hole expelled material outward into the galaxy,” said study co-author Christine Jones of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass. “This activity is likely to have had a big effect on the galactic landscape.”

Schlegel compared the behavior to belching after a big dinner.

“For an analogy, astronomers often refer to black holes as ‘eating’ stars and gas. Apparently, black holes can also burp after their meal,” said Eric Schlegel of The University of Texas in San Antonio, who led the study. “Our observation is important because this behavior would likely happen very often in the early universe, altering the evolution of galaxies. It is common for big black holes to expel gas outward, but rare to have such a close, resolved view of these events.”

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